In real life dating, as in pop culture, fatness is often treated as something a person has to overcome in order to be considered an acceptable romantic partner. The trope of the fat girl with the "great personality" ("great personality" being a common code phrase for "ugly" or "fat") who triumphs over dating adversity and finds a date who is able to see past the fat is commonly used in movies, television, and pretty much any other form of entertainment.

Oprah has made clear throughout this season that because it's the last, she only wants to cover topics and guests of real significance to her—I applaud her for using her platform to raise awareness about the benefits of a vegan diet. That being said, this episode was a real mixed bag.

This week on Grey's Anatomy: problem storylines galore! Pregnancies, relationships, everyone telling everyone else what to do, and not a whole lot of anyone listening to anyone else. Grey's wants to set us up for sweeps with a bang, apparently, and we've got a lot of thoughts about it after the jump.

Jennifer K. Stuller isn't your average Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan--she's a charter associate member of the Whedon Studies Association. In this episode of Read My Bitch, the podcast for Bitch magazine fans to read out loud a favorite article from the archives, Stuller revisits Rachel Fudge's article "The Buffy Effect: or, a Tale of Cleavage and Marketing," which was published in 1999, after the second season of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In our discussion afterwards, Stuller, a pop culture critic (author of Ink Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors and Grrrl on Film Bitch guest blogger), goes beyond what Buffy represents to feminists, but what legacy the Buffy has left--and what the future holds in store for small-screen heroines.

Feministe links to the full list of events for the Walk for Choice. Mark your calendars for Saturday! At Feministing, Ann Friedman talks about her experience on MSNBC talking about Planned Parenthood and points to ways to speak out and donate.

Also at Feministing, Rose describes a feminist's fraught feelings about Malcolm X.

Like Nadra Kareem Nittle recently did, The Detroit News talks about the relationships between race, names and discrimination, focusing on one loaded name in particular: Washington. (via Racialicious)

Did you miss blogger extraordinaire s.e. smith on the Glee panel at Western Washington University? Keep up with ou's reviews, collected on Tumblr!

There's been an uproar in New York all this week about an anti-abortion billboard in Soho. The billboard featured a little black girl with the message, "The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb." Launched by anti-abortion group Life Always, the billboard served as a controversial way to bring attention to the fact that black women have a disproportionately high abortion rate in New York City and nationwide. While that's clearly worrisome, suggesting that black women are a threat to black children for exercising their reproductive rights is extremely offensive. One of the top reasons women get abortions is because they can't afford to raise children. Rather than address this dynamic as well as the disproportionate number of African Americans who lack health insurance, Life Always chose to publicly disparage black women.

Each month in our nifty newsletter (sign up on the homepage if you haven't already), we'll be polling Bitch staffers and readers on their top five in different categories and posting the polls and results on the Bitch blog. This month, it's female characters we miss now that they're gone. So c'mon, give us five!